“I am never tired,” was the grave, deliberate answer. “Sometimes, Signor Andrea, I ask myself what the people would do without bread.”
“Eh!” he exclaimed.
“If the wheat were to fail...! Who can have invented bread?”
They turned to her in amazement; Alberto attempted a joke.
“You should be able to tell us, Lucia. They must have taught you that at school, where you learnt so many things.”
“No; there is nothing that I know. I am always thinking, but I know nothing.”
She was looking singularly youthful, in her simple cotton frock, striped white and blue, confined at the waist by a leather band, from which hung a small bag; with a straw hat with a blue veil which the sun mottled with luminous spots; her chin was half buried in folds of the gauze that was tied under it.
They had halted before a large panel, a marvel of patience, whose frame consisted of dried beans strung together. Along it ran a design executed in split peas in relief; the ground of the tablet itself was in fine wheat, threaded grain by grain. On it, in letters formed of lentils, might be read: “A Margherita di Savoia: Regina d’Italia.”
“Whose work is it?” asked Lucia.
“Two young ladies, daughters of a landowner at San Leucio.”